2003-04-30

Cadtools Insight

The client I was visiting today also had a field engineer from a cad tool vendor visiting for a tool install. While we were waiting for something to download from the internet, I asked him if his employer had determined a strategy for dealing with RedHat's plan to aggressively obsolete its free distributions. This is a problem for end users, because since RedHat is only planning to support their free releases for the first year, it means that in order to stay current on whatever the issue of the day is, they must get on the upgrade treadmill. Meanwhile, the cadtool vendors are still only supporting their tools running on older revs of RedHat. Requirements of 7.2 and 7.3 are not uncommon, and some vendors insist on 6.x as the platform. And if the customer calls up looking for help with a problem and answers the what rev of RedHat are you running? question incorrectly, they get told sorry, that is not a supported configuration, have a nice life.

This was the first he'd heard of it. Not exactly reassuring for the future.

RedHat is fine

I take back what I said yesterday about RedHat and NIS. Turns out that whomever set up the DHCP server for this network told it to hand out the wrong NIS domain name. Another case of DHCP lying to its clients -- information in only useful if the clients can actually use it.

At least I can plead innocent on the DHCP server configuration. It is a windows box. (I still got to fix it, though.)